Will came to where the creek slowed and pooled. Water spiders flicked across the black surface, while insects of unimaginable variety cruised a foot above, each overcomplex as his wildest masterpieces of alien ships.
He tightened the chin strap of his Helmet before placing his slipper on a wobbly rock at the shore and wondered how many Outside boys had already died doing exactly this. Hopping between some even more treacherous rocks, he decided to return later to stabilize them with smaller stones as a public service.
Soon he came to a small bridge, where he climbed a purple-thistled embankment, emerging from the woods onto a street that cut over the water. Will stood with his toes on the curb for five minutes, looking left and right like someone at a tennis match until he found the courage to scurry across the road into a stand of pine.
Again astride the creek, he knew he was nearing a highway because a shush-and-roar, roar-and-shush could be heard. Will wondered if he should be spooling out thread as he walked but settled on entrusting the neighborhood topography to his genius-powered memory. Sun seeped from behind a cloud and the creek lit like jewels poured down a flight of stairs. The highway, fenced off atop a berm, roared with logging trucks whisking whole forests away to Toronto, he figured, where his mother said he was born—to which he’d always jokingly replied, “Wasn’t it damp down there?” The creek ducked through a concrete tunnel beneath the highway; next to it a metal culvert was lodged in the berm, a passage for foot traffic.
There he spotted some boys clustered around a large rock in an adjacent field of sun-crisped muskeg. They were tinkering with something, discussing it, intermittently guffawing. Will squinted, but the distance made him dizzy and he could not find Other Will in the wild blur.
Will puzzled over something odd about the boys until he realized that none of them were wearing Helmets, and despite his dangerous lifestyle, neither had Other Will. Will grasped with shock that nobody in movies or any book he’d read had worn Helmets except warriors, people playing sports, and soldiers. Drawing a brave breath, Will reached up with pincered fingers to disengage the plastic clasp beneath his chin. The straps fell away from his cheeks as he brought his hands to his ears. He steeled himself, hoisting it from his head. A pleasing breeze kicked up in his hair, cooling the sweat that had dewed his brow thanks to his mother’s sweater. He set the Helmet behind a rock—noting where his mother had discreetly markered Cardiel inside the foam—and planned on retrieving it later.
Will abandoned the path and crunched into some sword grass, half-enjoying the faint lacerations on his calves that he hoped wouldn’t bleed profusely. Closer, he could see the four boys were clad mostly in black and dark gray, their shirts like Other Will’s: pictures of zombies and fire, with writing in old-time fonts crafted of metal. They had long hair and resembled Vikings in a way that was as exciting as it was fearsome.
“Hi, other kids,” said Will. “Are you making a masterpiece?”
The boys turned briskly to regard him like deer to a rifle shot. All were still squinting as though they couldn’t hear well, while one busily enshrouded something on the rock with his jacket. They had a cooler, along with six or seven coils of garden hose, the bright green of a poisonous frog, stacked neatly behind them. Their skin was dark like Other Will’s, and a notion dropped into Will’s mind that these boys were Indians.
“So what are you guys doing?” Will said, snapping the tension.
“Do you have any money?” said a tall and gangly boy with an enormous bony Adam’s apple.
“No,” Will said, ashamed. “I left our checkbook at home.”
The tall boy nodded, as though this confirmed a universal expectation.
“What’s through there?” asked Will, pointing his thumb over his shoulder to the culvert.
“County Park,” said another, older than the others.
“Oh,” Will said, wondering what park would have such an imposing entrance. “Are you guys friends with a boy named Will?” he said. “I gave him a garden hose just like those. We’re friends.”
Trucks bellowed past on the highway, intermittently washing away the sound of the creek. “I don’t know anyone named Will,” said the tall one, his throat bucking.
These Outside boys all spoke too slow and said too little, as though suffering from some collective hearing deficiency, perhaps brought on by the highway’s roar. At home, Will’s mother had cautioned him against rushing through his sentences, so he described Other Will loud and slow, his hair, his scars, his slingshot, highlighting the coincidence of their sharing a name, enunciating the way he did for foreign deliverymen.
“Marcus didn’t steal anything from your stupid yard, so you’d better shut it,” the tall one barked.
“No, no, I gave it to Other … I mean Marcus,” Will said, unable to grasp how his friend could possibly get his own name wrong.
“It doesn’t matter because our friend Marcus left town a while back,” the tall one said. “So it couldn’t have been him.”
“No, I think you guys may have a hearing problem. It wasn’t very long—”
The tall one made a nauseated face. “That a joke, Will? You hurt my feelings,” he said, palm to heart.
Will had only been officially Outside a short time and was stilled by the idea he’d already done another boy wrong. “I’m sorry—”
“Hold this,” another boy with big ears said warmly, passing Will something, as though this little gift was the antidote to everything. Will turned the object in his hands. A ball of electrical tape. There was a small hole on top, and it was faintly warm like the biscuits his mother baked in the breadmaker. A ball for some sport, Will concluded.
The other Twin—he saw now they were identical—began flicking matches from his thumb into the dry grass. Beside the cooler and the hoses were scissors and a heap of matchbooks. Though he adored fire—the unpredictable leap of heat, the way it whittled things down, the very thought of flaming arrows—Will had never lit a match before.
The others were still watching the ball he was holding.
“Look, I’m pretty good at art and building things and stuff,” Will said, wary of tooting his own horn, “so maybe I could help you guys out with—”
“—Throw it in the bush!” the boy who’d handed him the ball yelled, half-laughing, staring at Will’s hand.
“What?” said Will.
“Shut up, Ritchie,” the big Twin said and Ritchie tightened his mouth.
“Really, what?” Will repeated, keen to align himself with the joke.
“Don’t worry,” the other Twin said, “he lit it an hour ago and it didn’t go off, so it’s probably definitely not going to.”
Will squeezed the ball between finger and thumb. “This is, like, a bomb?” he said, half-serious, the smoking wasp-nest husk in his front yard returning to him now.
“Just a little gunpowder and a thousand match heads,” the big Twin declared nonchalantly.
Will shuddered. He whipped it to his feet and cringed backward. He would’ve picked it up to hurl it farther, but his muscles were locked. What would his hand be now had the bomb gone off? He remembered how forceful the bang Outside his house had been, how sharp and violent. Will pictured a plate of his mother’s slow-cooked spaghetti at the end of his arm and it only looked cartoonlike, silly.
The boys broke into peals of unsmiling laughter.
“I can’t believe you did that to him!” the big Twin said, pushing Ritchie jovially.